Hubert Feyrer <hubert.feyrer@informatik.fh-regensburg.de> writes:

> On Wed, 17 Jan 2001, enami tsugutomo wrote:
> > Here is my local mod to top(1) to print wchan for sleeping process.
> > Some of us also likes this change.  So, I'd like to commit this.  Is
> > there any objection or thoughts?  Especially, is it better to have a
> ...
> >   PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE   RES STATE      TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
> > 21958 enami     10    0   748K 1232K wait       0:00  0.67%  0.24% bash
> >     4 root      18    0     0K   24M syncer    16:19  0.15%  0.15% ioflush
> > 21957 root       2    0   268K 1380K select     0:00  0.22%  0.10% sshd
> >   284 enami      2    0  8200K 9520K select    56:17  0.00%  0.00% XFree86
> > 11117 enami     36    4    20M    4K stop      22:14  0.00%  0.00% <emacs>
> > 23502 enami      2    0   712K    4K select     7:28  0.00%  0.00% <slogin>
> >  2863 enami     28    0  1820K    4K stop       3:44  0.00%  0.00% <w3m>
> >   287 enami      2    0   396K    4K select     1:23  0.00%  0.00% <kterm>
> >   166 root       2    0    48K  348K nfsd       1:02  0.00%  0.00% nfsd

Cool! I used to have a top patched to do that, but I lost it when I
upgraded from 1.3.x to 1.4.x. Having wchan available in a top display
makes it much easier to figure out the source of locked processes.

> I think it's confusing as see seem to have a whole bunch of new CPU states
> now. replacing wchan in favour of wchan, and leaving the old state avoids
> this.

I'm not sure I understand what "replacing wchan in favour of wchan"
means. Are you suggesting a separate WCHAN column?

Isn't it the case that the STATE column is more or less redundant
when there is anything of interest in WCHAN? After all, it's always
"sleep". And when STATE isn't "sleep", WCHAN is empty - you have two
columns whose information can be completely contained in a single
column. Aside from that, if you put a separate column for WCHAN,
either the display must be wider than 80 columns, or you must get rid of
something else.

I like the patch the way it is. The only possible change I might
suggest (and there probably isn't enough room for it on the line
anyway) would be to give some sort of indication *in the same column*
that the process is actually in a sleep state. Maybe, eg, "(S)select",
"S-select", "W-select", "(select)", or something like that.

As far as commandline options for the feature - I guess that at least
depends on if there are any scripts out there using the output of top
(and depending on the contents of the STATE column). If so, then its
default behavior should probably remain the same as much as possible.
Otherwise, I think it would be better for this new behavior to be the
default, since newbies otherwise probably won't find it.